Bohemians, Bootleggers, Flappers, and Swells

The Best of Early Vanity Fair

For the magazine's centenary celebration, an anthology of pieces from the early golden age of Vanity Fair. Editor Graydon Carter introduces these fabulous pieces written between 1913 and 1936, when the magazine published a murderers' row of the world's leading literary lights. It features great writers on great topics, including F. Scott Fitzgerald on what a magazine should be, Clarence Darrow on equality, D.H. Lawrence on women, e.e. cummings on Calvin Coolidge, John Maynard Keynes on the collapse in money value, Thomas Mann on how films move the human heart, Alexander Woollcott on Harpo Marx, Carl Sandburg on Charlie Chaplin, Djuna Barnes on James Joyce, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., on Joan Crawford, and Dorothy Parker on a host of topics ranging from why she hates actresses to why she hasn't married. These essays reflect the rich period of their creation while simultaneously addressing topics that would be recognizable in the magazine today, such as how women should navigate work and home life; our destructive fascination with the entertainment industry and with professional sports; the collapse of public faith in the financial industry; and, as Aldous Huxley asks herein, "What, exactly, is modern?"-- Publisher description.In honor of the 100th anniversary of Vanity Fair magazine, Bohemians, Bootleggers, Flappers, and Swells celebrates the publication's astonishing early catalogue of writers, with works by Dorothy Parker, Noel Coward, P. G. Wodehouse, Jean Cocteau, Colette, Gertrude Stein, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sherwood Anderson, Robert Benchley, Langston Hughes and many others. Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter introduces these fabulous pieces written between 1913 and 1936, when the magazine published a row of the world's leading literary lights.

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VERY HIGH QUALITY BOOK, WITH CRUCIAL INTERVIEWS WITH SUBJECTS WHOSE THOUGHTS STILL RESONATE THESE LATTER DAYS. SOME OF THE REAL BIG LITERARY AND ARTISTIC NAMES OF THE 20TH CENTURY. SOME REAL THINK-PIECES, TOO, SUCH AS ALDOUS HUXLEY, DJUNA BARNES, BERTIE RUSSELL, HEYWOOD BROUN. finally got my caps under control.....fscottfitzgerald is represented here. if you would like to read the best of scott, my recommendation is THE CRACK-UP. this is late writing of his, completely autobiographical, written when he was in socal, writing scripts for the movies (Faulkner went Hollywood, also. neither of them experienced much success doing this, I think Faulkner wrote most of the script of a chandler film (Raymond, that is). Billy Wilder had a lot of that one. Script writing is different from novel-writing or story-writing, though lots of people think it not so. I don't even think 'it's almost the same' would qualify as an accurate comment on the situation. Hemingway, by the way, had no use for the mystery-suspense writers. TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT is the closest to their genre he ever wrote, and it is not the best thing he ever wrote. Anyway, Ernie's not in this book. He was more an ESQUIRE type of writer. Make of that what you will.